"Wake up, genius."
So begins King's instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, a Salinger-like icon who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn't published a book for decades.
Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.
Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he's released from prison after thirty-five years.
Not since Misery has King played with the notion of a reader whose obsession with a writer gets dangerous. Finders Keepers is spectacular, heart-pounding suspense, but it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life—for good, for bad, forever.
***
I'm probably preaching to the converted here, but let me let you in on a little secret to some: though books are a big deal to people like you and me, we're outnumbered and undoubtedly outgunned by those folks who wind their way through life without ever really reading. To them, the way we've committed to literature is... quite simply inexplicable.
What they don't know—and what we, the enlightened, indubitably do—is that great writing can change lives. Great writing like the work of one John Rothstein, creator of Jimmy Gold, the real American hero at the heart of The Runner trilogy. On the basis of those books, a legion of readers "judged Rothstein to be one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, right up there with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Roth." (p.85)
Morris Bellamy, a twisted little twentysomething whose mom doesn't love him enough in the late 70s of Finders Keepers' first chapters, is one of said series' dyed-in-the-wool devotees—right up until he slaughters its author.